Wireless telecommunications services, such as voice, data, and messaging, provide users with communications access within a coverage area. These services allow users to communicate without the need for a landline thereby offering superb flexibility over landline communication solutions.
Many people are foregoing landline services, such as landline telephone service, in favor of a wireless service for all their communications needs. In addition to voice service, many users have adopted messaging communication services, such as short message service (SMS) messaging, enhanced message service (EMS) messaging, and multimedia message service (MMS) to communicate with others. The convenience offered by these messaging services has garnered a large following among wireless service users, but has especially impacted communication habits of young, technologically astute demographics, such as high school and college aged persons. The wide-spread appeal of SMS service has fostered the creation of more advanced services like MMS, which allows users to append a sound, an image, a video or other media to a text message.
The popularity of messaging services has been leveraged by many third-party service providers as a way to distribute content, such as ringtones, images, videos, music, games, and other content to wireless users. For example, many third-party service providers offer service whereby a user can message the provider using a specific character string and short code to acquire content. Messages sent by a user as a request for content are sent in the clear with no encryption or other mechanism to preserve anonymity. This practice may compromise a user's identity, network integrity, and/or consumer confidence in a wireless service provider.